The four drives, which will ship in capacities between two terabytes and four terabytes, are now available through select distributors and resellers. They are priced between $160 and $310.

Large-scale replicated environments, mid-sized network attached storage deployment and backup/archiving applications are the applications that the U.S. storage company had in mind for its new product line, which distinguishes itself with a dual processor, dual actuators, monitoring technology to correct linear and rotational vibration and a multi-axis shock sensor.

WD says it uses Se drives in its own datacenter, where it tested them using the Apache Hadoop open-source framework.

The drives fit in WD's overall business portfolio somewhere ahead of its Red line, which targets the small NAS system market, and behind its performance-focused Xe and durability-focused Re lines, which address large-scale rack-based NAS sytems.